In the News

Historical Posters Show the Arguments for Women's Suffrage

It is a big week for civil rights milestones. Today is the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (which Ideas wrote about on Sunday), while Monday was the 93rd anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, being incorporated into the Constitution. To celebrate the latter achievement, the Schlesinger Library at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute, has been promoting its recently digitized collection of posters from the women's suffrage movement. The posters are interesting in lots of ways, including the glimpse they provide into the range of arguments that activists used to earn women the right to vote. As you can see in the images below, these include the argument that all the other states are doing it, and so should yours; the idea that men and women deserve equal access to good things like voting; and emotional appeals to women's roles as mothers.

Edna Lamprey Stantial helped Maud Wood Park '98 gather the material that became the Women's Rights Collection, the seed from which the Schlesinger Library grew. In this photograph taken in Radcliffe Yard in August 1943, Inez Haynes Irwin, Park, and Lamprey celebrate the gift of the collection to Radcliffe College.

Out of the blue, a call came in last March from a young woman who identified herself as the great-granddaughter of Edna Lamprey Stantial. While Stantial’s name is familiar to those who study women’s suffrage, there’s no significant collection of her papers in any archives, so interest at the Schlesinger was immediate.